4/6/08

Picante da Beira Baixa Cheese (DOP)

Picante da Beira Baixa, or Picante, is a hard, piquant, highly salted traditional cheese handcrafted from a mixture of raw sheep and goat's milks. This is dark white to grey coloured cheese weighting between 400 g to 1.000 g. It’s also caled “queimoso” (burning) due to strong burning flavor and peculiar intense smell.

This is a cheese only advised for the fans of strong flavors. It comes mainly from Serra da Gardunha mountain range located beyond the Estrela mountain range, in the Central region of Portugal. With its peak (“Pirâmide”) at about 1224 meters high, mainly dominated by Granite rocks. This area presents excellent conditions for the practice of Paragliding activities.